A Year in Fife Park Read online

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  A Year in Fife Park

  First published in Great Britain by Willow Ink, 2010.

  Ebook Edition

  © 2000-2010 Quinn Wilde

  ISBN: 0-9552269-2-9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9552269-2-2

  (ISBNs apply to ePub version only)

  For Ella

  Disclaimer:

  I remember absolutely every moment, detail and event written in this book. Sometimes the pacing is uneven. Some chapters are very short. That is because nothing has been altered.

  That said, of course, all the characters, events and situations portrayed within this book are entirely fictitious and not based on any real experiences, persons, or places.

  Except for Fife Park. That place really did exist, although I may for legal reasons be writing about a different one.

  Contents

  The Big Three Oh

  New Term, New Quinine

  Home of Golf

  Upstairs

  Five of Seven

  Raspberry Canes, Nineteen Eighty-Six.

  Surf and Turfed Out

  Darcy Loch’s Whey Pat Flat

  Thunderballs

  Moving and Shaking

  Divan, Divan

  The Glow

  The Dark Room

  Theme Park

  Darcy Loch’s Pub Golf Hole-in-one

  Media Sift

  Green Themes

  Cassie

  The War of the Randoms

  The Crack of McWinslow

  Wallow Man

  Constitutional

  The Dudes

  Beasting

  David Russell Apartments

  David Russell Hall

  Smoking Gun

  The Wood and The Burn

  The Tortoise and the Hare

  VolcanoHead

  Fussball

  Darcy Loch and the Last Midnight Walk

  The East Nuke

  May Dip

  Post

  The Big Three Oh

  I am a grown man. I have a house, and a well paying job. I am desperately unhappy.

  I’m unhappy all of the time, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying myself. If you can’t see past that contradiction, you are probably one of the many people who would never guess that I’m unhappy. You probably don’t believe me, even now. If you knew me, you’d believe it even less. Thanks a lot. This Oscar-winning performance is for jerks like you.

  I am not having a mid-life crisis. I am thirty years old. As it turns out, that is not particularly old, and it doesn’t make me unhappy. Just sometimes, I wonder how I spent the last ten years. But this is not an age thing. I’m glad I’m thirty. People take me seriously. At first, anyway.

  I bought a house at the worst time in history, because it was the right time for me. I knew it was the worst time in history. Other people said it was the best. I waxed lyrical about it at the time – sometimes, I said, you just have to do what’s right for you. It’s right for everyone, people said, houses only ever go up in value! Now that the crash has happened, everybody else saw it coming and I’m the idiot. That doesn’t make me unhappy. That makes me feel smug and unappreciated. Plus, I like owning my house. I would have paid double to end my hate-hate relationship with estate agents and landlords.

  I appear to be good at my job because, frankly, most people are not. They are the smart ones. Being good at your job is an awful idea. You will only ever get extra work by being good at something, and you will be passed over for promotion because you’re too damn valuable to lose. That doesn’t make me unhappy. That makes me exhausted. If I end up having a breakdown, that will make me unhappy, but I expect that by then I’ll be too far gone to care.

  For a long time I simply had no idea why I was unhappy, and no notion to do anything about it. I thought there was just something wrong with me. But then I remembered that there had been a time when I felt differently. There was a time in my life when I felt happy, all of the time, even when I was miserable. Ten years have passed. Now mostly the feeling I get, when I think back to St. Andrews, is that I have momentarily lost something of great importance.

  Sometimes these days I walk from room to room, looking for something I had just seconds ago. And sometimes, doing so, I find it. That’s the best explanation I have for what follows.

  It will be a mess of memories, as best they are remembered. It will be a scattershot of histories, because I do not know what parts I can afford to leave out. There are mistakes and faux pas, damages and destruction, passions and revelations, longing and belonging, love, mystery, tragedy, respect, and just a tiny little bit of sex which has been romanticised and overstated to the point of hyperbole, and in any case was had by other people.

  It can start like this: I spent a year in Fife Park. Nothing at all happened, and nothing ever changed me more.

  New Term, New Quinine

  Every year in St. Andrews had a different theme; every year had a different feel, a different texture, a different atmosphere. The year in Fife Park, which I will consistently refer to as ‘Second Year’, was a sophomore journey of borderline psychosis. Only an idiot could be nostalgic about some of the memories I will recount.

  I am just such an idiot. I can still recall the élan of those days with a trip through my MP3s folder. Guided by Frank’s discerning taste, I still dearly hold on to The Delgados, Belle and Sebastian, six cover versions of Aha’s Take On Me, and a funny mashup of Star Trek dialogue that makes it sound like Spock is boldly fucking Captain Kirk in the ass.

  I was in new territory, all that second year, because I’d been so lost in the first. I’m not proud of the person I used to be. I didn’t know much about the world, but I knew just about enough to be a douchebag. I used to blame everyone but myself when my blindnesses caught up with me. I used to scream and wail with entitlement. I used to be a little shit. And I am lucky, so very lucky, that I did not simply grow into the fullness of adulthood without being made aware of that, as most people do.

  When I finally caught up with myself, at the end of the first year in St. Andrews, and at the beginning of this book, I was a damn mess. You should know this. I was happy, all of the time, even when I was miserable; it’s true. But I was miserable kind of a lot, as well.

  I made more mistakes in that first year than I’ve ever made. So many that it was sometimes impossible to tell where I’d gone wrong, or what to learn from them. I am fortunate to have had friends who were in equal parts forgiving and critical, or else I might have never known.

  A lot of Freshers died in that first year. Seven or eight, I think. A few fell off cliffs. One of them was one of us, though I never knew him well enough. There weren’t many other years like ours. For one guy, it was at the very beginning of the year, away on an introductory Mountaineering Club field trip, held even before any lectures had begun. His parents were still in town, in fact. I can’t imagine anything worse. Then again, some poor chap got hit in the chest with a football and died on the spot. All of which goes to show that you can never tell how things are going to work out.

  Home of Golf

  I stood in the hallway of Fife Park 7, braced against the screams coming from the kitchen, but not yet braced enough to enter.

  ‘You fucking cunting bitching fuck.’ So came the next wave of expletives.

  It was followed by a series of crashes, some isolated thumps, an almost comic tinkling of glass, and several further crashes.

  ‘You cunting fucking mothercunting shit fucker!’

  My hand hovered over the handle.

  ‘Who’s he shouting at?’ Mart asked, behind me. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It is
what it is.’

  ‘Very Zen,’ Mart said, unimpressed. ‘You should get in there. He might hurt himself.’

  I pushed the door, and a spray of porcelain flew past my nose, right to left. It was my porcelain. Another mug hit the door before it was half open. I poked my head around the door.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  It wasn’t any time for reason. It wasn’t any time for smalltalk. Another mug was lightly tossed, and he spun the golf club round to intercept it. I pulled my head back into the hallway just in time.

  ‘Fucking bastarding shiteating cuntbreathing fucking cocksores.’

  When you use the word cunt as frequently as an angry Scotsman, it can be hard to find something stronger, for those special occasions.

  ‘Cocksores, huh?’ Mart said.

  ‘Are you okay in there?’ I called through, voice raised and strained - like he’d been in the shower for forty minutes. Another fracturing crash.

  ‘Hello?’ Mart shouted after.

  I looked in again.

  The cupboard doors were off, and three more kicks took out the drawers, bam, bam, and bam. The 7 Iron came down hard on the edge of the work surface.

  It cracked, shards flew off. It was chipboard underneath. I shut the door firmly.

  ‘We’re going to let him work it out,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is. I don’t care about the kitchen. It’s not mine.’

  ‘And the plates?’

  ‘Yes, they’re mine. That changes nothing.’

  The crashes came for minutes on end. Eventually they slowed, like almost-done popcorn. Mart reached for the door handle.

  ‘Give him a minute,’ I said. We gave him two.

  Frank emerged from the kitchen. The picture of composure.

  ‘Should have used a six,’ he said, tossing me the club.

  There was trouble, later.

  ‘If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand this,’ said the wrinkled killjoy at Residential Services. She looked like she had just about a year to prove herself right.

  ‘Neither will I,’ I told her, honestly. ‘It’s just shit that happened.’

  Upstairs

  Fife Park, at the time, was the cheapest student accommodation in the UK. [We paid around twenty-nine pounds per week, a figure which will become less connected to reality with every passing year, until one day I’ll simply have to refer to it as ‘old money’.] That does not make the final repair bill, which eventually tallied up at significantly more than a year’s rent, any less impressive.

  The park is a shitty set of early 1970s buildings, modelled on your average pebble-dashed, papier-mâché suburban Scottish council estate. At the time of writing, Fife Park is fast approaching its final year on this earth, and has been around nearly forty years longer than I would have expected it to last in the brisk winds of Fife.

  Each house has six bedrooms; three up, three down; two toilets (with one shower between them); a kitchen which can comfortably seat four, as long as nobody is trying to cook; and a hallway, with a flight of stairs. At the top of the flight of stairs is a sheer drop, made ‘safe’ by a little wooden barrier which cuts off just below the average person’s centre of gravity.

  The walls are made of painted cardboard. The rooms, and the two miniature corridors separating them, were carpeted in some kind of rough green hair which, barefoot, was oddly painful to walk on. The upstairs toilet was floored with something blue and slightly spongy.

  We had the upstairs of Fife Park Seven. I was in Room Five. My partners in crime at the start of that year were Craig McCartney, and Frank McQueen.

  Craig has the physical build of the undead. Tall and broad-shouldered but utterly emaciated, he carries himself with a slight shrug, and arms that suggest they are reaching out towards you, even when at his side; a posture that makes him seem permanently ready to spring.

  He’s got just a trace of that bad guy streak that women like. This is fundamentally because he is a bad guy. It is also, in part, because he is highly, and deliberately, mysterious. It was no surprise when he announced his mysterious past – in as many words – and then shortly into the year started dating a mysterious girl. Years later, he got a mysterious job. This also came as no surprise, although if the job is anything like the girl, he’d have been better off staying at home and stabbing himself with a fork from nine to five.

  Craig once told us he had left Dundee because he killed a man. Anyone can say they killed a man. Some guy called Robin told us he killed a man, one night. We called him Bobby Bullshit for four years on the back of that. We didn’t call Craig a damn thing, just in case.

  Craig is also capable of the unexpected – or perhaps it would be more fair to say that he never ceases to amaze me. The unexpected was something we both celebrated, back then. We would drink to Random together, and Random would find us. Looking back, I can see how much this meant to me. It is the paradox of the gambler; when something is random, there is hope beyond one’s own means. At nineteen, that was probably just the hope that I’d get laid, or at least home. But ten years on, finding myself desperate and hoping for hope itself, I wonder if it would be as easy as raising a glass with a friend, to feel so free again.

  I value my friendship with Craig tremendously. At the darkest fringes of myself, he understands me. I wonder sometimes if we are similarly broken in some way. We do not talk about such things, but we joke, casually and confidently, about the worst of human nature. Craig exudes confidence, but does not do many things casually. He is stubborn, uptight, and controlling. He’s clean, particular, and demands order. We found a tube of Anusol in the bathroom one day, and he didn’t even pretend it belonged to anyone else. He held out surprisingly well in Fife Park, all things considered.

  Frank McQueen, on the other hand, was a big, hairy man. There’s no fairer way to put it. He wore a hooded top back before that was grounds for an ASBO, and wasn’t afraid to wear it with the hood up. Frank had a dark and tousled mess of shoulder-length hair, which was as thick and intractable as the very real man-rug poking up through the V of his collar. He owed his style as much to the Unabomber as to Ché Guevara, but the effect was all his own.

  ‘I am the Walrus,’ Frank would say. He would say this several times a day. It was unquestionably the case, and a source of great pride.

  Frank was a medical student. There are two kinds of medical student in the world, and I’ve lived with both. On the one hand you have the type who are certain that most things that aren’t book shaped are going to kill them, who wash their fruit before eating it and dial Emergency if they swallow a couple too many aspirins in a 24 hour period. They study conscientiously, get early nights, and believe everything they read in textbooks.

  And then there’s Frank McQueen, somewhere just behind the vanguard of the opposing side; the medics who have realised that the human body is virtually indestructible and that it takes a hell of a lot more than pesticide and bird shit to take the wind out of your sails. They tend to drink, smoke, party on obscure drugs that don’t even have vernacular names, and crave anything that will push them closer to that little bit of life’s speedometer that would usually be coloured in red.

  It would be an injustice to call Frank easygoing. When Craig finally snapped and put in his request to move out of Fife Park, the last-straw event he cited was stepping on Frank one night, barefoot with the lights off. Frank, who had passed out face down three feet from the door of his bedroom, was naked. He didn’t even stir.

  In our First Year, Craig and Frank had lived next to each other in the Pink Prison that is New Hall, thrown together by the fates, or by whatever system of assignment the fates had delegated to Residential Services. [I’ve always thought the official name showed a stunning lack of either optimism or foresight on the part of its constructors. Perhaps they’ll rename it when it starts to show its age. If so, I hope they open it to nominations.] I don’t think any of us realised how little this had prepared them for each other.

  The Randoms lived downstairs, in room
s One, Two, and Three. We called them The Randoms, as a collective, even after we had been properly introduced. We called them The Randoms long after they had expressed annoyance with this.

  They had all been to school together, and had all elected to live together. They all came from in, or near, the same small and unexalted village of Strathblane. I have since been to Strathblane precisely once, and can confirm that it was most likely founded according to traditional local principles: by hammering together a couple of Scottish-sounding syllables and then building a pub. [Strathblane is just a handful of miles north of Milngavie where, given the dichotomy between spelling and pronunciation, they presumably built the pub first.]

  ‘Quinn, you know they’re all from the same village?’ Frank asked me, late the first night. ‘Strathblane, apparently.’

  We downloaded Duelling Banjos, and played it with the volume up.

  Five of Seven

  My room was freezing cold, pitch black half the time, and there was usually someone semi-conscious sprawled out on the bed. Often this was me. Despite this, my room was the most popular in the house, not counting the kitchen. This was almost certainly because of my open-door policy, because there were slightly fewer pairs of dirty boxer shorts on the floor than in Frank’s room, and because I had the best computer by a country mile.

  Craig also had a computer, and quite a good one, but he did not operate an open-door policy. In fact, he used to close his door and repeatedly lock and then unlock it for fifteen straight minutes, until he was satisfied that it was locked. Then he’d do the same thing with the light switch. From outside the house, it probably looked like he was hosting a very small and lonely rave.

  Craig kept his room like a boot camp. Every surface was cleaned and dusted, he used his own crisp linen on the bed, and the room permanently smelled of polish, air freshener, fabric softener, and cologne. We were only rarely granted access. I was actually beaten from the room with a rolled up newspaper for farting on one of the few occasions I managed to infiltrate the citadel.